Practical 7 Reflection

During Practical 7, we were asked to read and evaluate our local web portal website, STOMP (Straits Times Online Mobile Print), and its "Singapore Seen" section, which is a citizen journalism site.

There are certain criteria that we used to evaluate Stomp.com.sg. They are: coverage, authority, currency and accuracy. We want to see whether citizen journalism is effective in Singapore's context, therefore these criteria will allow us to answer the question.

If citizen journalism is effective in Singapore's context, then the coverage should be wide range (we would have different types of people contributing to the web site, and Singaporeans are usually stereotyped as "busybody"). We will not only have news regarding daily events around Singapore, but also life and happenings that major newspaper would probably not bother to publish (like the news where inconsiderate aunties stuff tissue papers on air-cons in bus). Citizen journalism would only be effective if the content covered stands out, and thus this is why coverage is a criterion to evaluate it.

The other criterion is authority, basically who posts the news. It is quite related to accuracy, another criteria when evaluating. Citizen journalism should be as accurate as possible, or else the advantage of allowing people to contribute to the news would disappear if everyone post rubbish on the website.

The last criterion is currency. Of course, it is good to be as current as possible, or else the website is probably "dead" and nobody is contributing, thus citizen journalism is viewed as not effective.

From this lesson, I have learnt about the different criteria that we can use to evaluate websites. It is important to do so because we will want our research materials to be as reliable as possible. When we do evaluation, we ensure that the website's content is believable and trustworthy, and that it is written by someone whom we can verify and has a good reputation.